India’s life insurers are required to publish their claims settlement ratios. What they are not required to publish – and what most do not – is the same ratio measured by the value of claims settled rather than their count. A new independent study, supported by regulatory data spanning multiple financial years, shows the two figures can diverge significantly at the same insurer and argues the value-weighted version is more relevant for brokers placing high-sum-assured term cover. The India Money Report (July 2026), published by financial-education platform Priyanka Personal Finance, examined individual death claims settled within 30 days, split by count and by benefit amount, in the Insurance Regulatory and Development Authority of India’s (IRDAI) Handbook on Indian Insurance Statistics 2023-24.
The structural nature of this gap is visible in how insurers present their own data. Bajaj Life Insurance’s own claims settlement ratio page advertises a count-based ratio of 99.33% for FY 2025-26, noting that 13,994 families received claim payouts in FY 2024-25. No value-weighted figure appears on that page. The widely-cited claims settlement ratio in IRDAI’s Annual Report refers specifically to individual death claims by count – not by amount – and the IRDAI Master Circular on Protection of Policyholders’ Interests, issued in September 2024, did not alter that formula.
The value-weighted breakdown is published in IRDAI’s Handbook on Indian Insurance Statistics, available at irdai.gov.in. While IRDAI has directed insurers to disclose settlement and rejection data on their own websites, that directive covers the count-based figure. The amount-based ratio is accessible but not required in insurer marketing, broker comparison tools, or standard distribution due-diligence frameworks.
The India Money Report’s central finding is the divergence between settlement speed by count and by value. ICICI Prudential Life settled 97.09% of individual death-claim policies within 30 days by count in FY 2023-24, against 91.16% by benefit amount – a gap of −5.93 percentage points. The India Money Report attributes this to longer scrutiny applied to high-value claims. HDFC Life and Axis Max Life, by contrast, showed gaps of +0.01 and +0.18 percentage points respectively.
Four smaller insurers – Kotak Mahindra Life, Ageas Federal, Future Generali India, and Aviva – settled 100% of individual death claims within 30 days, though across books of only a few hundred to a few thousand claims. LIC processed 7,99,612 claims in the period – more than the entire private sector combined – at a 30-day settlement rate of 96.42% by count. Private insurers as a group averaged approximately 99%. “For a family waiting on a ₹1 to ₹2 crore term payout, week three is the product. The industry’s most-quoted number measures whether claims get paid. The regulator’s newer data measures the week families actually live through – and it deserves to be quoted just as often,” said Priyanka Dhawan, founder of Priyanka Personal Finance.
The FY 2024-25 IRDAI Handbook – available at irdai.gov.in – confirms the count-vs-value gap persists at industry level. The industry-wide settlement ratio by count stood at 98.32% in FY 2024-25, against 97.18% by amount – a 1.1-percentage-point gap present across six consecutive years of data, narrowing from a COVID-era peak of 2.2 percentage points in FY 2020-21, according to Gyansurance’s analysis of the IRDAI Handbook.
At the insurer level, Bajaj Allianz Life recorded 99.32% by count against 93.78% by amount in FY 2024-25, with an average denied claim of ₹59.6 lakh – nearly 10 times its average paid claim of ₹6.2 lakh. That pattern has held for five consecutive years. Shriram Life recorded the widest gap in the industry at 16.7 percentage points, with only ₹81.80 of every ₹100 claimed reaching the nominee by value. Both figures are drawn from Gyansurance’s published analysis of the IRDAI Handbook 2024-25. For a broker, two insurers with identical count-based ratios can produce materially different outcomes for a policyholder presenting a large claim.
The count-vs-value gap has not gone unnoticed at IRDAI. In November 2025, IRDAI chairman Ajay Seth addressed the pattern publicly – in the context of health insurance – at BimaLokpal Day. “In health insurance, we continue to see gaps – while the number of claims settled is high, the amount settled, especially in full, is sometimes lower than expected. This is an area we are monitoring closely,” Seth said, according to Business Standard. Seth added that the regulator expects insurers to be prompt, fair, and transparent in claims settlement, noting that anything less would weaken trust in the sector. The India Money Report applies the same analytical framework to life insurance, where the Handbook data shows an equivalent structural pattern.
The speed benchmark has also shifted. Under IRDAI’s current master circular, non-investigative death claims must now be settled within 15 days of receiving all documentation – reduced from the previous 30-day requirement. Where investigation is required, the settlement deadline is 45 days from claim intimation. The handbook data underpinning both the India Money Report and the FY 2024-25 analysis was compiled under the older standard.
The India Money Report calls for voluntary, standardized disclosure of 30-day settlement rates by both count and benefit amount alongside the headline ratio, arguing the count-versus-amount split is a sharper due-diligence question for brokers and advisers recommending large covers. The data already exists in the IRDAI Handbook at irdai.gov.in – published annually and available for download – but requires active retrieval that is not integrated into standard comparison or distribution tools. Gyansurance, which publishes a detailed analysis of IRDAI Handbook data, recommends that for any policy with a sum assured of ₹50 lakh or more, the amount-based settlement ratio should be cross-checked alongside the count-based figure, noting that a gap of more than three percentage points is a signal that denied claims are concentrated at higher values.
Dhawan argued that insurers with strong figures on both metrics have a competitive case to make them visible. “Insurers with clean speed-and-value numbers should be publishing them proudly,” she said. The full report, methodology, and 14-insurer comparison table are available at priyankapersonalfinance.com. All underlying figures are sourced from IRDAI’s Annual Report FY 2023-24 and the Handbook on Indian Insurance Statistics 2023-24.
